A query letter for my book

Feedback welcome

I realized a few weeks ago that after years of playing with my manuscript and continually revising the essays within it, that it was time to see if the material is of interest to a publisher. My peers in the London Writer’s Salon seem enthusiastic as was the audience at the Santa Fe Art Institute when I read the revised introduction aloud, so now I get to test the waters in an industry that is undergoing vast changes, and see if there’s interest or whether I’ll ultimately end up self-publishing. Publishers that I’m considering include North Atlantic Books, Pluto Press, Haymarket, AK Press, PM Press, OR Books, and my former publisher, New Village Press. I’m exposing the letter here for your feedback.

Dear XYZ -

I am an artist/author who has written a fractured memoir about her journey from unexpected early recognition in the high art world into a community-based and collaborative, activist art practice. I describe the project as fractured because I interrupt the narrative of my life story with abundant examples of creative emergent strategies breaking through the asphalt of this time. The working title is “Dreaming for Our Descendents: Art Medicine for Catastrophic and Transformative Times.”

My first book was published by New Village Press in 2009. Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame is still in print, 16 years later. I created a social media presence for the book on Facebook. The private page, Arts for Change, now has a membership of over 6100 followers. It has given me and other members many opportunities to share curriculum, resources, and lead discussions; the networks created there have strengthened our sense of a collective presence and offered many opportunities to attend events, speak and lead workshops at conferences, exhibit our work, and collaborate.

I have been drafting parts of this new book via a Substack, Gravity Humming, for the past few years, and am weaving those essays into a smoother narrative while adding more content. Gravity Humming:

There are currently 355 readers of my Substack newsletter. To sample my writing, you are welcome to subscribe there for free.

One of the main theses of the book is to inspire readers with more compelling models of what it means to use one’s creative skills to address some of the most challenging issues of this time. With the examples provided, cultural workers will be able to recognize how necessary this work is to create solidarity and mutual aid in this time, and will hopefully begin to facilitate art projects within their own communities. The narrow path that most art programs and schools promote to their students is an increasingly obsolete one. The paradigm of success (getting into a hot gallery, selling one’s work to prestigious collectors, having a solo show in a major museum, etc.) is not only inaccessible, but it is often lethal to one’s creative spirit. With the debt that is accrued via traditional education, trying to “make it” under our current economic system, forces most artists to commodify or brand their output, so that it has little to do with the impulses that compelled them to make art in the first place, and if their goal is to develop celebrity status, it’s important to alert aspiring artists to how transient recognition can be within the corrupt status quo. It can also be very ungrounding and superficial. Offering other pathways that involve collaboration with progressive movements and diverse members of a community gives cultural workers resilient strategies for moving through this time of collapse.

By chronicling my journey from the “high art world” into becoming a more under-the-radar, creative collaborator, my hope is to give others the courage to think outside the box. When I turned away from the gates that had been opened by early recognition, I discovered some profound rewards from teaching art for social change in academia. I also write honestly about the pitfalls of subverting within that context. As Audre Lorde so aptly stated, “For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

I have found some lasting gratification from working within communities and in collaboration with activist movements. In this book, I offer up how the inspirational projects I’ve contributed to and witnessed have become more essential to our ability to thrive in this time. Within the US and the UK, there have been models of community-based art that were supported with government funding, but many young artists are not taught about these very successful projects (the WPA and CETA) nor do they learn about many of the contemporary creative emergent strategies that are continually popping up in the cracks. That is my mission, to inform readers about those cracks, so that they can take heart and move courageously and creatively through this dark time in the world.

Let me know if this project interests you.

Respectfully yours,

Bee (Beverly) Naidus

Public Art in the Eduardo VII Park in Lisbon, Portugal - June 2024 - Artist unknown

(I won’t be including this photo with my query letter, but I wanted an image here to playfully entertain myself and you).